


Jenny

by Aicosu



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Blood, Creepy Fluff, M/M, Mitaka Origin Story, Murder, Pining, Stalking, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Young Hux, Young Mitaka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 19:05:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8025451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aicosu/pseuds/Aicosu
Summary: In the Imperial Academy, prospective graduates had to kill a fellow cadet while making their deaths appear to be an accident. As a result, several cadets were killed under suspicious circumstances during training exercises.





	Jenny

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is for anyone who is as obsessed with Dopheld Mitaka as I am, or as he is for Hux. And as always, for my Reylux fam.

His name is Armitage Hux.

 

They call him little Prince.

 

And Dopheld first speaks to him with blood dripping down his nose.

 

The cadet’s punch had tasted like the sea-salt sickness of hyperspace travel. That queasy, churning lurch of having his gravity misplaced. It sent him sprawling to the floor, and he saw the blood splatter the tiles before he tasted it. Metal, burning. Hot. It made his eyes well up in tears. Anything to cool the brand of shame.

 

“Stay down.” The cadet demands and Dopheld doesn’t understand why it needed to be said. Because standing back up isn’t something he is capable of. His legs are made up of the same duracrete rebar of the floor. He’s apart of it now. The ground is his home, his family. The blood from his face seeping into the cracks and flowing in them like veins is proof of that.

 

But the stillness of his acceptance is rewarded with a boot bearing down to cuff his ear. His bones and skull press into the cold floor as if he will be forced to merge into it. And in a loud, wrenching, hateful and hopeful moment, Dopheld wants nothing more than to do just that.

 

He’ll die here. He knows it surer than he knows the words to his class pledge. Surer than he knows the Imperial concords for tomorrow’s test. Surer than he knows the standard regulations of all landing ships. Surer than he knows every code, every salute, every data of history. A history that will go on without him.

 

He will die here and it would change nothing. The crew will wash the floors. The cadet will graduate. The Empire will sprawl. And he, the unworthy, un-ranked, un-loved, ill-fitted, ill-suited little student will die. Another notch. Another necessity for something far greater than he.

 

It’s in that that he closes his eyes to the pressure increasing in the crook of his skull. His lips practically kiss the concrete, a suitable lover for his acceptance of failure. This was the way it was supposed to be.

 

“Get your boot off of him.”

 

The voice is tuning fork. A tapped, careful clang for order. Control. It’s the snap silence of a matchstick. The clicked cocking of ammo into a blaster. Everything goes quiet for it.

 

His eyes can only see the perfect polish of regulation shoes. They smell like woodoo-hide and blaster fire. A top student. Dopheld can picture the six gold stripes on the stranger’s arm even as his eyes cringe closed and he inhales oil and blood.

 

“What do you care?” The cadet booms. Dopheld can feel it in his bones.

 

“You already failed. Go try again.”

 

Nothing happens for seconds. Minutes. Hours. Cycles. Enough time that black fog clouds Dopheld’s eyes, his memory. His nose goes cold-numb as blood leaves his brain and his breath struggles to reach his lips. He imagines he’ll turn holo-blue before he turns white like his uniform. A white statue of a dead boy they’ll ship away in a box.

 

“Fuck you, little Prince. ”

 

The boot lifts from Dopheld’s neck, dnaand the spots in his eyes and pain in his chest is too loud, too colorful, for him to hear the cadet walk away. But when he finally, finally looks up, with bright neon spots and blood vessels still blinking like stars in his vision, his whole body shivers.

 

The little Prince is golden. The six gold stripes on his arm double in rank with the lines of his eyelashes and eyebrows. Promoted by the natural makeup of hDNA. He’d gilded. Perfect. Beautiful. Red all around, pink at the edges, and white at the center. Like the holos of the Death Star erupting in its own destruction. He was a person that looked like the death of all people.

 

“Stand up.”

 

Dopheld doesn’t think about the words as his feet scramble, skidding on the blood of his own face as tears meld into red and slide down his cheeks. It’s like he’s melting, plastic peeling back all his layers till he’s laid bare in the presence of an explosion

 

The Little Prince, with his delicate features and pretty eyes, is tall, not little. And when he speaks there’s a twang of a harp, the hum of a vibroblade. Dopheld’s heart flutters. Tightens.

 

“I could kill you.”

 

Dopheld’s eyes flicker to half lids.

 

He could. This little Prince could claim Dopheld’s murder for his own. Alone again, home, standing ready to fall back down to the ground, back into the blue-white of suffocation. It would be faster this time. He might even melt into a puddle before he lost his breath under the brilliance of this boy. But _oh_ , he would be alright with that.

 

At least then he’d be remembered as the Prince’s stepping stone to his inevitable greatness.

 

A white, pink edged hand comes out to swipe blood and tears from his face. Dopheld near flinches in excitement for a strike. But fingers press at his cheek, pull his lip, before smearing his own guts, his leaking life, onto the cream of his own uniform.

 

“Thank you.” Dopheld whispers.

 

“You’re welcome.”

 

The fingers leave his uniform, and Dopheld can’t see it but knows the ‘X’ over his heart must be there. Because he’s sworn in now. Graduated. Claimed. Every pledge, every rank, every salute, every order, it will be for this. For him. He who saved him from death and granted him life. Hux.

 

* * *

 

He is a parentless child now. A stray. Awestruck, lovestruck, dumbstruck.

 

He is Hux’s white-clad too-short shadow.

 

The distance between them as they walk from class to class is an obvious absence. Dopheld is sure to step with the same foot as Hux does, right left right left. The rhythm sends heat down Dophelds collar and makes his heart beast thick in his throat in tandem.

 

He waits for Hux outside sessions, each training hall, for each day, each minute. Dopheld replaces his obsession over terminal programming, flight statistics, and officer procedure with his obsession over Hux’s weekly schedule, the projects Hux was assigned, and Hux’s ranking scores. He transfers classes, moves groups, volunteers, manipulates until he finds himself seated beside his fixation.

 

He spends their first shared lecture memorizing the pleated threads of Hux’s hair and spends the night in the barracks fresher, yanking his own locks and plastering them back until it pulls tears from his eyes.

 

In their second class, they hang their overcoats beside each other on the racks. Dopheld watches the fabrics drape beside each other all hour. He shivers with his thighs shut tight, excited by the idea that the six-banded rank of Hux’s sleeve is brushing his poor, two-banded sleeve. Poly-woven synth-silk kissing one another in the back of the classroom. His palms sweat like it’s actually them. As if it is Hux leaning into his uniform and popping open regulation buttons one by one. When class ends, the slide of his jacket back onto his body nearly makes him moan.

 

In the third one Hux speaks to him.

 

Datapad chips pass through the class. Dopheld’s fingers shake as the tips of his kiss Hux’s, an illicit, terrible act that makes his body ache and writhe for more, for palms or wrists or, or-!

 

“Thank you,” Dopheld says, even as he is the one to hand the device to his classmate.

 

“You’re welcome.” Hux acknowledges.

 

The two words haunt Dopheld at night, slicked gel hair unraveling in sweat as his fingers, the ones that touched Hux, touch himself. Desperately, pathetically. Feverish. ‘ _Thank you, thank you, thank you!,’_

 

_‘You’re welcome.’_

 

He begins to open doors after that. Hurrying before the Prince like a personal royal guard, rushing over keypads, and putting his body under the weight of hatches. He assigns himself to retrieve Hux’s materials, Hux’s papers, Hux’s mail, Hux’s affection. He polishes desks, guns, shoes, and himself.

 

The other cadets start calling him schutta. A slang derogatory that Dopheld revels in. Schutta. Whore. The Prince’s whore. Hux’s whore. Hux’s Mitaka. He flushes in lust and pleasure when they slam him into his locker and shouts it in his face. It makes the ache of their smacks and punches a sick sweet rush. It’s a punishment he deserves. A punishment that tastes good with how fitting it is.

 

And he starts stealing things.

 

He’s ashamed of this at least. If not the following, and staring, and dreaming, the stealing is what makes him well up with thick, creamy, guilt. It coats his insides and makes his body heavy. But he can’t help himself. The little trinkets and treasures bring Dopheld closer to Hux than anything else he covets.

 

The first thing he steals is a pen. They are in line, signing a roster and over Hux’s shoulder, Dopheld watches ‘Armitage’ appear from intersecting lines like coordinates on a star chart. It’s sharp, aligned, perfect.

 

Hux builds empires with that pen. Towers and skyscrapers are in his T’s and his H’s. Cities flourish in his aurebesh. He crosses his “A” and “X” last. Like streaks of comets crossing over an city atmosphere. And Dopheld can’t leave the pen there, not when it’s tasted that power. That confidence.

 

He buries it away in his sleeve and scrawls ‘Armitage’ ‘Hux’ into his skin until it sticks. Until his master copy of that painting resembles what it might look like if Hux signed him, himself.

 

The second thing he takes is a shirt. He steals it after their physical regiment. Dopheld can’t bring himself to catch glimpses of his Prince’s bareness, his sweat-slicked pinkness, as he changes, but he steals the shirt after to imagine it instead. He burrows it away in his sheets at night to let the smell drag him down to delirium. To sleep. It’s woodoo-hide and cold aftershave. Blaster fire and pomade. It’s the sweetest smell he knows.

 

The collection grows. A data chip of old notes, the metal tab of a popped portion pack, a blaster’s dead power cell, clipped hair, and a pair of parade gloves.

 

Dopheld presses them into himself, replaces things of his own with things of Hux’s. Sometimes he allows himself the privilege of imagining he’s some kind of historian, some holo-artifactor. Cataloging pieces of a perfect man who will be shrined someday, talked about, revered. As if Hux isn’t that man already.

 

Other times he lets himself get away with the sinful imagining that he’s a lover.  A spoiled, cherished lover who's been given remember-me-amulets, wait-for-me tokens, and not-quite-goodbye-kisses from a soldier gone to change the world.

 

Dopheld would wait forever for him, even if Hux didn’t even know his name.

 

* * *

 

They call him little Prince because that’s what he is.

 

Their Emperor, their Lords, their Leaders. They’ve all died. Their High Admirals, Commanders, First Captains and Front Squadrons; their top-tier prodigies, their First Family’s, their A-list gold-rank bests, they all died at the front.

 

All that’s left is the second string. The ungraduated, inexperienced, weak-willed and their children. Second-class general’s and their second-guess grades, teaching a handful of people like him. Unfamiliar un-classed family names like Mitaka.

 

But Commandant Brendal Hux is not second string. He comes from a gilded world, and his son is all that the Empire instilled in it’s best and brightest. He’s the only royalty they have. The only son that could be called heir to everything.

 

So when Armitage Hux is cut from his second lecture hall and announced as the first to graduate; the first to leave, the first to succeed, no one is surprised. But Dopheld stares pale-faced and bloodless as clapping thunder echoes in his ears, as an Officer’s pin is placed on his Prince’s chest. A shield over Hux’s heart.

 

They are separated by blood. In rank, in class, in name, and in literal, horrible, real blood.

 

Dopheld mourns. He sobs deep into his barracks and asks why, why, why, he hadn’t been the one. Why he hadn’t felt Hux’s fingers around his throat, around his heart, as it beat its last rhythm into an invisible tattoo in Hux’s palm. He would have been good at that, at dying for him, for Hux. And why, why, why, had Hux not sought to do it to him, the easy target, the boy who’d practically begged for it as he’d followed Hux around, alone, close, insignificant. Easy. It could have been so easy.

 

Because he would never get there. There would be no gold star for him. A Mitaka. Not when he was weak, miserable, and easy. He was to be a notch. Not a number. Hux would rise and Dopheld would fall. Would die. But now it would be the to the hands of someone else. Someone much stronger than him. And they would have the prize. The pleasure. The privilege of saying ‘Thank you, Sir,’ and hearing ‘You’re welcome.’

 

Instead,. Dopheld lets tears crawl down his cheeks in the open air of the hallways, packed with cadets, but empty, barren, without the presence of his Prince, his fixation, his Hux.

 

He wanders, parentless, tweaking, ripped from everything he wanted, including the mercy of death and searches for a chance to say goodbye, even if it means only by sight.

 

Hux’s schedule is etched over his own, and Dopheld finds himself once more, as always, for the last time, alone, with the brilliance of his idol. His god.

 

Except he’s not.

 

The hall of the Academy seems tighter, smaller, too small, when another cadet steps in front of the little Prince, and claps a hand on Hux’s shoulder.

 

It’s wrong. It hit’s Hux the wrong way, makes the most awful sound, presses against the perfect weave and imprints creases into the fabric.  Dopheld feels his heart clench. They shouldn’t touch him, they shouldn’t-- he isn’t to be touched. The handprint looks heavy, wrong, like an impression in a field of perfect snow. Irregular.

 

The cadet is smiling, nodding, speaking to Hux as if it were a normal thing to do. As if Hux is simply another cadet, simply someone, simply. Hux is not simply anything. He is more, they should know that. It’s so clear. He is all they all, all anyone has. All Dopheld has.

 

“Congratulations.” They say.

 

“Thank you.”

 

_‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ No, no, no, no, no,_

 

Dopheld’s fist hits the cadets face with the whiplash weight of hyperspace travel. That queasy, churning lurch of having his gravity misplaced thrums through him as he collides himself into the student. They bang into the side of the hallway. It sends the cadet sprawling to the floor, and Dopheld sees the blood splatter the tiles before realizes he’s angry. So angry, burning. Hot.

 

Tears stream down his face, blurring the vision of red smattering up onto the wall as his boot finds it’s home in the cadet’s cheeks, their nose, their ears, jaw. Home, he belongs here, right here. The blood running from their head to the duracrete like veins is proof of that.

 

The weight of his thickness, his rage, gets lighter as the weight of the cadet’s struggle lessons. Soon he’s fighting no one. And when there is no longer a place to lodge his heel, Dopheld stumbles backward, shaking, crying, sobbing, tweaking.

 

It’s a mess of things. Of limbs and blood and durasteel railing and fluorescent lights and a cracked skull. But Dopheld can only see red all around, pink at the edges, and white in the center. Because the little Prince finally turns his eyes on him like he did the first time.

 

And it’s his notch. His passing. His death and birth all over again. It’s the promise of every pledge, every rank, every salute, every order. All thanks to him. He will be the second to graduate. To leave. He will be his hand, his boy, his schutta, his whore, his lieutenant, his Mitaka. And he will never be far from him, never again.

 

“Thank yo,” he says.

 

They will pin a gold shield over his ‘x’ marked heart. And pride fills Dopheld. Not from the trophy or the blood on his boots. But at the sound, the pure, perfect pitch of that, that, that voice. As he says, “You’re welcome.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Jenny](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyj4JFSErrw)\- by the Studio Killers  
>  Cadet murder taken from [Secret Academy](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Servants_of_the_Empire:_The_Secret_Academy)  
> [Woodoo-hide](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Woodoo_hide)  
> [Schutta](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Schutta)  
> [Commandant Hux](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Brendol_Hux)


End file.
